Tech Debt Is Eating Your Engineering Budget (Here's the Math)
The real cost of 'we'll fix it later' — calculated in dollars, not story points
"We'll fix it later" might be the most expensive sentence in software engineering. I say this not as an abstract principle but as something I can put a dollar figure on — and I regularly do, because founders tend to take tech debt seriously only when they see it as a line item on their burn rate.
Here's the uncomfortable math. If your frontend team is experiencing the kind of architectural debt I see in most Series A and B startups, you're likely losing 30% or more of your engineering velocity to friction that shouldn't exist. For a five-person frontend team at market rates, that's not a rounding error. That's a full-time engineer's salary going up in smoke every single month.
The 30% Number Isn't Hyperbole
When I audit a codebase, one of the first things I measure is the "friction ratio" — the proportion of time developers spend working around problems versus solving the actual problem. This includes understanding tangled code, manual testing because automated tests don't exist, fixing regressions caused by hidden dependencies, waiting for builds that take minutes instead of seconds, working around workarounds, and rewriting code because there are no shared patterns.
In a healthy codebase, these activities take 10-15% of a developer's time. In a debt-heavy codebase, they routinely hit 30-40%.
Let's Do the Math
A team of five frontend developers at $13,000/month loaded cost = $65,000/month. At 30% friction: $19,500 per month lost. $234,000 per year. Over 18 months: $351,000. That's enough to fund an entire design system, build tooling modernization, component library, test coverage, and architectural refactoring — several times over.
Why "We'll Fix It Later" Never Happens
Debt is invisible to product stakeholders. It doesn't show up in Jira. Debt compounds. Shortcuts in Q1 make Q2's code harder to write cleanly. The people who created the debt leave. Nobody knows why the code does what it does. Refactoring without architecture is pointless. Without addressing structural problems, you're rearranging deck chairs.
How to Start Paying It Down
Measure the cost. Track debt-related activities for two weeks. Having the number changes the conversation with stakeholders.
Target the hotspots. Focus on files that change most frequently — that's where friction has the highest daily cost.
Embed improvements into feature work. The boy scout rule only works when there's a clear direction to move toward.
Build the foundation once. A design system, component library, state management patterns, modern build tooling — one-time investments that pay dividends on every feature.
Tech debt is a choice. Not the initial debt — that's often a reasonable tradeoff. But continuing to ignore it once you can feel it slowing the team? That's a choice with a measurable cost, and the math almost never favors waiting.
If your team is experiencing this kind of drag, it might be worth checking how many of the common frontend symptoms are present. The answer often reveals whether you're dealing with isolated issues or a systemic pattern.